BODY COUNT (1986)

 

(a.k.a. BODYCOUNT; director: Ruggero Deodato. Screenwriters: Alessandro Capone [billed as Alex Capone], Luca D’Alisera, Sheila Goldberg, an uncredited Tommaso Mottola, and Dardano Sacchetti [billed as David Parker, Jr.].)

Storyline

Fifteen years after murders where a campground killer was never caught, a campsite becomes the location for a new spate of murders.

 

Review

An eight-year-old boy (Ben Ritchie) sees a couple murdered on the campgrounds owned by his parents (Robert and Julia Ritchie)─the murderer is not caught. Fifteen years pass, and Ben (Nicola Farron) still lives there. When a group of fun-loving young people come up to party and hike, a fresh round of killing begins.

Set in Chicago but filmed in Italy, BODY COUNT is an intermittently entertaining and oddball film. It mixes the ribald humor of PORKY’S (1981), the stalk-and-slay focus of FRIDAY THE 13^th (1980), marital drama, and the dreamlike intensity of a giallo. As a slasher work, it’s solid in parts, intertwined with scenes where the campers run around the campsite enjoying nature, in and out of their clothes. Their oblivious-to-danger behavior drives Robert Ritchie (played with loopy relish by David Hess) closer to a violent breakdown─Robert is haunted by the escaped murderer fifteen years prior. He lays traps in the woods and walks around with a gun, ready to shoot the killer should he show himself again.

Robert is not the only one affected by the murders. His wife, Julia (Mimsy Farmer, THE BLACK CAT, 1981), tired of dealing with Robert’s moodiness, is having an affair with Charlie, a quirky, bad-ass deputy (played by Charles Napier, BODY BAGS, 1993). Of course, Ben, who witnessed the murders, is strange─he is a nerd with rage issues, made worse by his parents’ problems.

Following the start of the new brutal murders, a few of them taking place in the campsite’s bathroom/shower house (convenient for multiple female nude scenes), the killer hides their corpses. The other characters do frivolous things.

Eventually the bodies are discovered. Robert and Julia’s marriage comes to a death-struggle end. Charlie the Deputy shows up for the big killing show, after running around the campground, checking out one clue or another.

BODY runs considerably longer than it needs to, with odd tonal shifts and sometimes bad editing (e.g., two characters, start to kiss in daylight─seconds later, when their lips touch, it’s nighttime). 

The characters, aside from the older adults, are disposable and unmemorable (though Nicola Farron’s Ben is unintentionally hilarious when he emotes). Much of the blame for these issues might lie in having a written-by-committee screenplay and a few instances where the film blatantly adheres to FRIDAY THE 13^th tropes: several scenes in BODY are lifted straight from FRIDAY flicks, e.g. a body thrown through a window, and some of its soundtrack sounds like a direct rip-off of Harry Manfredini’s FRIDAY THE 13^th PART 3 (1982) scoring─while these elements are effective and nerve-jangling, they also distract from what’s going on in BODY.

What BODY gets right is noteworthy, too. When Claudio Simonetti, composer extraordinaire and keyboardist for the prog-rock band Goblin, creates original music, it’s effective and often subtle. Emilio Loffredo’s cinematography, murky during daytime scenes, lends a dreamlike vibe to BODY. The neurotic older characters are straight out of a giallo, furthering the flick’s weirdness.

It helps that the older cast members are standout players. David Hess (THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, 1972), a prolific and successful musician and actor, was known for imbuing his often-raw characters with unexpected sensitivity. Ivan Rassimov (THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH, 1971), a veteran player in action and gialli, has a brief role in BODY, but he makes his character, Deputy Sheriff Ted, interesting. Mimsy Farmer is palpably distressed (and later unhinged) in her portrayal of Julia. Charles Napier’s Charlie the Deputy has a good-‘ole-boy-but-heartfelt-about-Julia vibe.

Its sequel-inviting end-scenes are not shocking but appropriately offbeat.

The above elements make BODY a mostly mundane and sometimes badly edited flick with a few instances of standout acting and entertaining bits thrown into it. While I’m glad I saw it, it won’t be a film I revisit any time soon. It’s worth your time if you're really into slashers/gialli and keep your expectations low.